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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8158105" data-attributes="member: 16586">[USER=6795602]@FrogReaver[/USER] There is no unified front here. We are all talking about different games which are played in different ways. The games I am mostly talking about are primarily concerned with character advocacy where a player's perspective is firmly grounded on achieving their character's desires and are responsible for playing a credible protagonist. Some games that @permerton and others are talking about such as Fate and Cortex Heroic are games I personally consider story advocacy games in that the table is mindful of the narrative they are creating together and work together to weave a tale together. Some consider this controversial. On Agency in Character Advocacy Story Now games<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">I am personally not concerned with maximizing agency. I am looking for games that naturally produce emergent narratives that contain fraught personal struggles. For that to work there need to be meaningful consequences in the same way that in adventure gaming your character can be physically hurt, subjected to all manner of nasty spell effects, and face death and injury. If psychosocial conflicts are going to be central rather than secondary to play having mechanics with actual teeth helps a great deal.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">We're talking about agency rather than autonomy here. Being able to advocate for my character and achieve their goals often depends on the ability to oblige someone else to be constrained by my play. The price I pay is to also be obliged to change the way I play based on their play. If we are to have agency over the fiction in a socially equitable way we must accept other players' right to agency as well.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The social environment at the table between players should be considered in any analysis. In the absence of mechanics that impact the psychosocial environment our characters find themselves in we fall back on encultured expectations of player behavior. Tabletop roleplaying games have common cultural expectations that in the absence of being modified by the game we are playing tend to limit our autonomy. Frenzy in Vampire, Emotional Conditions in Masks, and other psychosocial mechanics provide permission to play in ways that are not normally socially acceptable in an adventure gaming environment. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">This will not be a big deal to you I expect, but they help to resolve the tension between playing well and playing with integrity. In adventure gaming there is often a whole host of conflicts between playing your character as if they were a person and achieving the objectives of the game. This creates a whole bunch of conflicts between players with different objectives at the table. We blame players for acting according to the incentives the game places in front of them instead of seeking to resolve this tension through game design. When I play Masks playing well pretty much means engaging with the stuff my character would engage with anyway. When playing D&D I am in a constant of tension if I care at all about who my character is and what they want.</li> </ol></blockquote>

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